Another Visitor

[CHJ]

Just realised had not posted these from the 14th.

 

[Eric The Viking]

Good looking fox that. But I assume you don't keep hens...

... my sister, who does (keep hens), had a stand-off with one at her back door last year: the hens were due to be shut in for the night, and she had collected one of her older hens that's going blind, and had it in her arms.

The fox sat on its haunches about ten feet away and wouldn't budge. She's convinced it was waiting for a mistake by either her or the hen, so it could pounce.

Sis says the worst thing about the hunting ban is that now, several fox generations on, they're no longer afraid of humans. Round her way, in S.E. Somerset, they're a menace, apparently.

I have mixed feelings about the whole thing, but tend towards her view. Thanks to 'recycling' causing a good food supply to be easily had, they're extremely common in suburban gardens now, and were never threatened in any case. There was talk at election time of repeal, but it's all gone quiet now.

Meanwhile chez nous The blue-**** and tree bees are going great. We have five or six fledglings crashing about the garden, with more to come, so they've done really well so far. The bees have taken over the other nestbox, on the side of the house, but they're very gentle and quite buzzy in warm weather. I can close my eyes and imagine I own Cragside house in Northumberland!

I'll try for some pics, but don't really have the right lens at the moment, and I'm not going to get close to the bees just for a snap! The mouse (my avatar) was taken close to the bird feeder (on the adjacent rose bush) a couple of years ago. His descendants are still around, and worryingly, I saw a brown rat last week, gorging on the seed thrown down by the sparrows (very messy eaters!).

 

[Finial]

We have plenty of foxes in suburban North London. We see them often and sometimes one comes to the french window and watches us. My daughter in central London has them too. There are no hens round here now, but they make a mess, bringing rubbish into the gardens, fouling and digging holes (unless it's the cats, I haven't seen them do it). One evening I saw one calmly trotting along a city pavement among the pedestrians as if it was going to work.

 

[CHJ]

...... But I assume you don't keep hens...

Have in the past, and lost some to a vixen mid afternoon who was obviously trying to feed new cubs.

...... I have mixed feelings about the whole thing, ....

Yes it's a difficult balance, I've no compunctions about culling if the local environment is being excessively damaged and to keep a balance as long as it's done humanely with proper marksmen etc.

I also think a Hunt gathering is a splendid site, what I can't bring myself to accept are the packs that ride with a whole gaggle of 'smart set' followers and exercise the pack so rarely that they have no control of them and have to have two or three quad bikes racing round the lanes with no road tax and insurance looking for groups of stray animals making a nuisance of themselves following Deer and Badger trails though peoples gardens.

My first disillusionment with hunting was in the 1950's when I witnessed a master of a hunt and mates digging out a den of young cubs on a river Severn escarpment half way between Holt Fleet and Stourport on Severn so that they could be release 6-7 miles away closer to where the Worcestershire Hunt (based at Holt Castle) rode.

I have the same misgivings about the gamebird shoots of captive bread birds for sport, but I live in an area where this is part of the culture and a significant part of the income that supports a whole load of other conservation measures.
I admit to having several dozen of the shot birds currently in the freezer rather than waste them like those that don't make it to the pet food chain and just end up burnt or buried in the ground.

The Pheasants and Partridges that escape the shoots nest close to us and pop in to scrounge the readily available food.